Posts Tagged “scales”

Lately I’ve worked on several small projects, mostly to learn new technologies. The newest one is music-related: a piano that shows scales and chords “in context”, to learn and explore music theory. The idea came about because my first instrument was the guitar, and music theory is pretty hard to make sense of when you’re playing the instrument. It’s just too hard to remember all the notes you’re playing, let alone realise when two chords in the same song are repeating notes because those notes might be played in different positions (eg. one chord might use E on the open sixth string, and another might use E on the second fret of the fourth string).

I remembered that when I started playing around with a piano, and I could figure out how to play a couple of chords, it was painfully obvious that they were repeating notes because they are in the same positions. In the same way, it felt much more natural and easier to figure out on a piano which chords fitted a scale, so I decided to write Music Explorer, and ended up even buying music-explorer.org to host it. I don’t have a particularly grand plan for it, but I’ll probably add at least some small improvements here and there.

If you are interested in the technical side of it, Music Explorer is written in JavaScript (EcmaScript 6, to be more exact). I learned to use React with JavaScript, Browserify, Sass/SCSS, Ramda, AVA, the fantastic JavaScript music library teoria and a bit more CSS while writing this so it was definitely a useful learning experience for me. The full source code lives in GitHub and it’s licensed under the MIT license so you can go have a look!